Alcid Trip

Hello and welcome to my first blog post. Today was my first day at Skagen and there were a lot of first birds for me as well! We started the morning off at World’s End 3 and spent the morning doing a sea-watch. I was just counting Common Eiders (Ederfugl; which was a lifer for me!) but we had lots of highlights. We had a lot of Alcids (Atlantic Puffin - Lunde, Little Auk - Søkonge, Razorbill - Alk, Black Guillemot - Tejst). We also had some other fun birds like King Eider (Kongeederfugl), Woodcock (Skovsneppe), and Great Northern Diver (aka Common Loon (Islom) aka the rightful national bird of Canada). I personally also got some potentially less interesting lifers such as Black-legged Kittiwake (Ride). By the end of the morning watch it was getting very windy so we were happy to head back and warm up.

The best hand-warmer

After a few hours of lunch and relaxing we donned our waders and headed back out to set up mist nets. There were 7 of us so we split into 2 teams and made light work of set-up. We ended up putting up 15 nets out of a possible 22. We also had a few Bitterns (Rørdrum) nearby that were keeping us company with their croaking.

Net set-up

We welcomed two visitors who will be staying with us for the coming week and said goodbye to Roman who was pleased to get his Puffin (Lunde) lifer on his last day. Tomorrow we’re looking forward to set up the rest of the mist-nets so we’ll be ready to start ringing :).

Highlights

Taffeland - 2
Kongeederfugl - 1
Skovsneppe - 1
Lunde - 1
Søkonge - 1
Islom - 1

 Link to todays observations in Dofbasen from the Skagen area

Sum of the Raptors in the area based on observations typed into Dofbasen.